Old photographs

The photographs are old,

some faded, spent flowers,

forgotten, left in a shoe box left

in a closet smelling of mothballs

and cedar, sisters in form-fitting

dresses, bobbed hair, smiling

at the photographer. I know them

but I know them thirty years later

as they were careening to old age

but smiling, always smiling

at the photographer. They knew me,

thirty year later, and we all smiled

at the photographer.

Photograph: WPA Artists, 1930s, Michigan Department of Natural Resources. 

Is Poetry Going to the Dogs?

First it was the cats. Now, it’s the dogs.

Dogs are writing poetry. I am not making this up.

Don’t believe me? Try “Another Bag:”

Love

True, unbridled love

Is looking at what I just did

On the sidewalk

Then picking it up in a bag

I can only imagine as a treasured keepsake

Wow, the collection you must have by now.

Only a dog could have written that. I know that for a fact. We had a dog, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, for 14 years. We used 16,000 plastic sandwich bags in assembling our collection from the sidewalk. He also considered it an honor for us to pick it up.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by X Posid via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Secrets of Happy Families

I was born into one of those “yours mine and ours” kind of families. Both of my parents had been previously married; my father had been married twice before. I had a half-sister from my father’s first marriage, and a half-brother from my mother’s first marriage. Then there was me, followed by my younger brother.

We lived in New Orleans, exotic, yes, but we lived in a fairly typical post-World War II American suburb. The subdivision was long blocks of three-bedroom ranch houses. I was smack in the flood of the famous Baby Boom, and so I knew overcrowded schools and everything else that came for the Boomers.

At the time, most of us didn’t think in terms of happy or unhappy families. Our families just were. Some families were clearly better off financially than others, but I never asked whether my own family was happy. I don’t really think any of us did. Some families were large and others small. Some did a lot of screaming at each other (mine was relatively small and extraordinarily quiet).

But even the screaming wasn’t considered bizarre; it was just something that came along with some families. (The one really loud family in our neighborhood that I remember best had two parents and six children living in a three-bedroom house, and five of the six children were boys.) (I’d probably be a screamer, too.)

Children accept all kinds of situations as normal, because it is normal for them. It’s what they know. It’s the familiar. It may be far from ideal, but there’s a security in the familiar. And I know there can also be insecurity in the familiar.

It wasn’t until I was older that I began to understand many things about my own family that I didn’t see as a child. Every family has tensions; every family has brokenness. Broken people bring brokenness into every family. Both of my parents had been divorced, and I think there was often a determination to make this marriage work. But I know the possibility occurred to both of them.

But brokenness does not preclude happiness; families can be happy in spite of a lot of things stacked against them. But what I’ve learned in my own marriage is that it takes work – lots of work. And it’s helped enormously that both of us share the same faith.

Over at The High Calling, we’re starting a book discussion on The Secrets of Happy Families by Bruce Feiler. Feiler likes lists, and the book promises to have lots of them. What he’s done is to look at the studies, the research, the anecdotes, and his own experience, and identified what happy families seem to have in common. It promises to be a lively discussion – after all, we all have an opinion on families.

Related:

NPR did a story and interview with Bruce Feiler.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Sunday morning, early August

No raindrops this Sunday morning,

early August, only sheets of sunshine

falling into unexpected coolness.

The menarda stripped of pollen, the bees

hover over roses, and that unknown purple

flower by the kitchen window, even

salvia for a brief moment, then swarm

away to find a better restaurant or

a more accommodating waiter, committed

to an unwavering faithlessness.

Photograph by Andrew Schmidt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads: Planned Peasanthood

It’s one of those things about the internet – a tweet on Twitter leads to a link on a web sites leads to a link on a blog that leads to another blog. It was (if I remember my links correctly) how I found Rick Dawson at Planned Peasanthood. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

It doesn’t matter. Good reading is good reading, no matter who finds whom. The name of his blog, he says, has its origin in a running joke between him and his wife. And in spite of the joke, or perhaps because of it and what lies behind it, he’s a generous, caring, encouraging man.

Over the course of his lifetime, Rick has been a clerk, a DJ, a radar operator, a dishwasher, and a musician. He’s been a software installer, a factory worker, a web site developer, an emergency responder, and an airline customer service agent. He’s always been a musician, playing the guitar since he was 13. And he’s a cancer survivor, and you can read his story at Caring Bridge from 2012.

But of all the things he’s been, the most important one is his faith. His home church is the American Reformed Church in Luverne, Minn.

Rick’s posted a series with a fellow blogger this week on the discipline of silence (and it’s not only for monks). Silence is a larger topic than you might think (or than I thought), and I’ve found the series moving and inspirational.

So please visit Planned Peasanthood, and meet Rick yourself. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Painting: The Gleaners, oil on canvas by Jean-Francois Millet (1857). Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

Douglas Patten’s “Olde Mysterium”

Daniel is walking out on what is left of his life. Admittedly, little seems left. He’s been out of work for a long time, having lost his job at a Seattle newspaper. His wife has been unfaithful, and although she pleads with him to stay, the marriage seems dead. He walks out into the night with a small bag, $5 and expired credit cards. He’s full of anger, rage at himself, depression, age-old hurts, and a broken heart.

He spends the first night on the street. And then he’s beaten unconscious. When he awakes, he finds himself in the upstairs apartment of the Olde Mysterium bookshop, being tended to by the shop owner, Saba Ghazal, a Lebanese Christian. And Daniel’s life will never be the same.

Thus begins Old Mysterium: A Parable by Douglas Patten. It’s a story of brokenness and faith, anger and forgiveness, and how one man learns the hard lessons of life and faith.

Daniel’s story doesn’t happen in a straight line, adding both familiarity and realism, because no one’s journey in faith happens in a straight line. Instead, it’s a few small steps, and then a stop, followed by slipping back and then almost falling forward. Daniel learns much about love and forgiveness from Saba Ghazal – and then finds he has to keep forgiving over and over.

The story has elements of the biblical stories of the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well, and several others, but artfully blended together to create a new story that forms a cohesive whole. (And it’s more novella than novel in length.) For those of us who came to faith as adults, even young adults, the story will often seem like our own story – we recognize ourselves in many of the characters.

Olde Mysterium evokes tears and smiles, memories and awakenings. And it explains the basics of faith in narrative form – grace, love, and forgiveness.

Photograph by Kajoch Adras via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Chris Pennington’s “Rapture’s Rain”

Jason Stover is a high school physics teacher living with his wife Kristina and daughter Nikki in Lake Royale, North Carolina. They have a good life. Jason is even becoming interested in his wife’s faith, and has been attending a Bible study with several friends from church.

Then comes the day he walking in his yard, and the air cracks and sizzles. Jason wakes up a day later, still in the yard, and goes looking for his family. But they’ve vanished. So have most of the other members of their Bible study. So have a lot of people.

Jason does find some of his friends, and together they begin to try to understand what’s happened. People all over the world are reported missing. Some are saying the vanishings suggest the rapture in the Bible. Jason and his friend begin to map it out. It looks like it might be that, but there are still unknowns.

Law and order begin to break down. A second physical disruption happens. And Jason begins to realize the planet is losing power, and that food no longer had the nutritional value it did before. Earth is dying, and the people left are dying with it.

This is the story of Rapture’s Rain by Chris Pennington.

I usually don’t read apocalyptic literature. I never read any of the Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. But I read Rapture’s Rain, and I kept reading through workouts on the elliptical and treadmill at the gym, while waiting for my computer to power up, and at night before I went to bed. I read it almost straight through. It’s a riveting story.

But more than that, it is also (surprisingly) realistic. Instead of describing the “macro” viewpoint of what’s happening in the world, Pennington focuses on the up close and personal, the “micro” view of what happens to ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And questions of faith – and what happens to faith – abound.

Thoroughly engaging, Rapture’s Rain is also, simply a good story.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.